A year ago, China beat out the United States by building the most powerful supercomputer on earth. The Tianhe-2 (Milky Way 2) hurtles at 33.9 petaflops. A petaflop is a quadrillion calculations per second. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s computer geniuses battle at the leading edge of this global supercomputer arms race and expect to leap into first place with a new goliath by 2017 that will scream along at 160 to 200 petaflops.